No label defined (Q4432162)

This is the first of the famous series of ``Séminaire de géométrie algébrique'' of Alexander Grothendieck and his collaborators, started in 1960-61, in which Grothendieck constructs (and studies the main properties of) the algebraic fundamental group \(\pi^{\text{alg}}_1(X)\) of a scheme \(X\). If \(X\) is a complex algebraic variety then the profinite completion of the topological fundamental group \(\pi_1(X)\) coincides with \(\pi^{\text{alg}}_1(X)\). This fundamental construction is extremely important when for example \(X\) is an algebraic scheme over a finite field extension \(K\) of \(\mathbb Q\) because the knowledge of \(\pi^{\text{alg}}_1(X)\) contains already a lot of information about \(X\) (in some cases, enough to reconstruct \(X\) itself). To quote Serre (from his talk in the Bourbaki Seminar of the fall of 1991), this seminar was the first great success of the theory of schemes. Due to these facts it certainly deserved to be republished by the Société Mathématique de France as a volume of ``Documents Mathématiques''. The present volume is a (slightly) corrected and updated version of the previous edition [Lect. Notes Math. 224 (1971; Zbl 0234.14002)]. Some updated remarks have been added by M. Raynaud, which are bounded by brackets [ ] and indicated by the symbol (MR).